Dreamfever - Hardcover

Alloway, Kit

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250078113 ISBN 13: 9781250078117

Verlag: GRIFFIN, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Finding out that she is the True Dream Walker hasn't gone at all the way Joshlyn Weaver would have expected it to. The only special gift she seems to have is an ability to create archways, which really isn't that special. In addition to her inability to connect with the Dream, she has also started having nightmares that are so terrible she can't tell anyone about them. Not even Will.

Just when Josh thought her life couldn't get any more complicated, the lost dream walker princess returns to claim her parents' right to the throne, right as the Lodestone party threatens to take control of the government during the upcoming Accordance Conclave.

With the clock running down, Josh must rely on not only her friends, but also her enemies, to stop the radicals from taking power and controlling the Dream. But how can she expect to save everyone else when she's struggling to pick up the pieces of her own shattered life?

Dreamfever will have you on the edge of your seat as Kit Alloway takes you even deeper into the world of the dream walkers, and will leave you begging for more!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KIT ALLOWAY writes primarily for young adults, having always had an affection for teenagers.  In addition to writing, she plays various musical instruments, decorates cakes, mixes essential oils, and studies East European languages.  She lives in Louisville, KY with her family and four very tiny dogs. Dreamfire is her debut novel.

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Dreamfever

By Kit Alloway

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2016 Kit Alloway
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-07811-7

CHAPTER 1

Josh Weaver shaded her eyes as she mounted a low dune, her heels digging deep into the hot sand with each step. Above her, an oversize sun the color of goldenrods roasted the landscape, and around her the desert stretched endlessly in all directions, like a dusty orange carpet that just kept unrolling.

"I'm getting sand in my shoes," Will Kansas, walking beside her, complained.

Josh glanced at his torn-up sneakers, one with a ripped heel and the other burdened with black tar, and smiled. Will could destroy a pair of shoes faster than anyone she knew.

Along with the shoes, he wore jeans — also in bad shape — and a navy-blue T-shirt with a Serena's Pizzeria logo on it. Unruly clumps of auburn hair stuck to his damp forehead, his blue eyes were screwed up against the light, and a pink streak was swelling across his cheek where he'd been hit by a shutter in an earlier nightmare, but he looked good to Josh. He always looked good to Josh.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him glance at his watch.

"You too tired for this?" she asked. Since they'd gotten the crap kicked out of them by a zombie and a deranged scientist four months earlier, they both wore out faster.

Will shrugged. "Nah, I'm okay."

"I could help with this one," she offered.

"No," he said firmly. "Stay here. Practice your merging."

Josh heard the anxiety in his voice but didn't know how to soothe him. His skin graft had healed, his stitches had come out, and he had the feeling back in his fingers, but emotionally he was far from recovered.

She put a hand on his arm. "If you need me, just give a shout."

"Don't worry," he said, checking his shoulder holster. "I won't."

Josh sighed.

The structure atop the dune didn't look quite like anything else Josh had ever seen. Long adobe walls stretched toward the open sky, reminding her of the Southwest, but the lack of roof meant the building offered little protection from the sun.

Closing her eyes, she carefully broke Stellanor's First Rule of dream walking: Never let the dreamer's fear become your own. She'd been breaking it for so many years that she didn't even pause to consider the wisdom of her action.

She allowed the dreamer's fear to touch her, just one fingertip, then two, and the taste of panic she felt wasn't the connection with the Dream that she wanted, but it told her what she needed to know.

"It's not a building," she said, her eyes flying open. "It's a labyrinth."

She and Will reached an opening into the structure and stopped walking.

"I was pretty sure this is a monster dream," Will told her. He had been the one who had chosen the nightmare back in the archroom. "And you know what monster lives in a labyrinth, right?"

"The Minotaur. Half bull, half man."

Will's blue eyes widened in surprise. "Yeah."

Josh frequently napped during world lit, which Will knew. Six months ago she might not have known the word "labyrinth," let alone been able to identify the Minotaur. But that had been before a madman with an extensive classical education had downloaded his memories into her brain. Now she not only knew the Minotaur, she could quote lines about him from both Ovid and Dante.

But Will didn't know that, and Josh had been biting her tongue pretty hard the last four months to make sure he didn't find out.

From inside the labyrinth came a deafening bellow. The ground shook so hard, Josh had to grab Will's shoulder to keep from falling over. She wasn't certain, but she thought she heard a word in the cry.

"Did it say 'spheres'?" she asked Will in a whisper.

"I thought it said 'deers.' Are you sure you want to try this now?"

Josh nodded. "Just keep it distracted."

Will unbuckled his shoulder holster and removed a .22 semiautomatic. "I should have brought a bigger gun."

Today was the first time Josh had let him bring any sort of gun into the Dream. He was not actually much good with them, despite having practiced more than most Olympic shooters. She tried to figure out a polite way of taking the .22 away from him and couldn't come up with one.

"Love you," was all she said.

He grinned, kissed her quickly, and headed into the labyrinth. "Love you back!" he called over his shoulder.

Josh sank to the ground until she could sit against the labyrinth wall. The heat captured in the adobe felt good against her back and shoulder blades, and she took a few long, deep breaths to settle her heart rate.

She was already losing interest in the nightmare — what she wanted was to merge with the Dream itself. She felt hungry for its ease and expansive freedom. She had felt it once, felt her mind blown open to contain all the World's dreams and nightmares at once, and she had been trying to recapture that sense of unity and connection ever since.

So far, she had been unsuccessful.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

She closed her eyes and focused on the air moving in and out of her lungs.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale ...

She stopped thinking, as much as she could. Instead she felt her body's weight on the sand, the relentless heat of the sun tightening her skin, and the dull ache in her right elbow that never fully went away. She focused completely on her physical self.

An image flashed in her mind. With a phantom's eyes, she saw the labyrinth as if from above. The walls were moving on tracks hidden beneath the sand, sliding from side to side, blocking off and opening up routes at random. Staying lost forever in such a maze would be easy.

Then the flash was over, and she was back in her body.

The night she and Will and Haley had almost died, she had felt the entirety of the Dream inside her, the whole universe filling her skin. This comparatively meager merger felt like being teased, but it was as close as Josh had been able to come.

More deep breaths, more focus ...

The next flash showed her Will, jumping out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed between the ends of two walls, and the dreamer, a little old Middle Eastern man in jean cutoffs and a red tank top that hardly covered his pot belly.

Finally she saw the Minotaur, and she understood for the first time why the Greeks had considered it a terrible monster. It stood taller and overall larger than she had ever expected, so large that its bull's head looked proportional, and its swarthy body rippled with muscle. It didn't even have a neck — its jaw just expanded into its shoulders, and its whole upper body twisted when it turned to look at something. Its horns were chiseled to needle points, each pointing forward and slightly out to the side.

But none of that made the Minotaur anything more than intimidating. What scared Josh was what the monster had done to itself: it was trying to become human, one body part at a time. Swaths of human skin in varying shades of pink and brown had been sewn over its fur. Its cow's eyes had been torn out and replaced with human eyes, one blue and one green, and they were too small to fully fill the Minotaur's cavernous eye sockets. Strangest of all, it had pulled out all its teeth and was wearing a pair of human dentures that filled only the front third of its bull's snout.

It released a roar, half bull's bellow and half human shout, and the word it shouted was neither "spheres" nor "deers" but "EARS!"

Gross, Josh thought.

Just before the flash ended, she caught a glimpse of someone...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: GRIFFIN
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250078113
• ISBN 13: 9781250078117
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: KreGa Onlinehandel GmbH; 4950000000000; info@krega-onlinehandel.de; ; Birkenweg 31; Brakel; 33034; Deutschland